Cute animals are great.

Tattooed animals with questionable personalities are better.

Welcome to Tattoo Zoo, a world of tattooed animal characters, collectible plush, blind boxes and other weird little things we probably didn't need to make—but absolutely did.

Around here, you'll find tattooed pandas, bulldogs, monkeys, dinosaurs, bats, cats, ducks and an increasingly ridiculous number of other animals joining the Zoo.

But Tattoo Zoo didn't start because the world needed another stuffed animal company.

It started with tattoos.

From Tattoo Culture to Tattooed Animals

Tattoo Zoo was created in 2021 after spending years inside the tattoo industry.

We loved the artwork, individuality and culture surrounding tattoos, but had an idea and creativity took it somewhere completely unexpected.

So we started putting tattoos on animals.

Not real animals. That would create several problems.

Plush ones.

The original idea was simple: create tattooed animal characters that felt different from the traditional stuffed animals already out there.

But pretty quickly, they became more than animals with tattoos.

They needed names.

Then personalities.

Then stories.

Then friends.

Then apparently entire collections of bats, cats and ducks.

Things escalated.

So, What Exactly Is Tattoo Zoo?

Tattoo Zoo is a character-driven collectible brand built around a growing universe of tattooed animals.

Every character has their own look, personality and collection of tattoos.

Some are cute. Some are chaotic. Most are both.

The original Zoo includes characters like Kenji the Panda, Samuele the Lion, Barbara the Bunny, Buddy the Monkey, Hiro the Pig and Theodore the Bear, but the population hasn't exactly stayed under control.

Since then, animals like Candy the Unicorn, Dwayne the Rhino, Keanu the Koala, Thrash the Dino, Sandy the Sloth, Pixie the Seahorse and Randy the Shark have joined the crew.

And then things got even stranger.

The Zoo Started Multiplying

Eventually, individual characters weren't enough.

We started creating entire collectible families.

Batties brought a colony of tattooed bats into the Zoo.

Cattoos did the same with cats.

Then came Quackos, because apparently tattooed ducks were the logical next step.

These collections expanded Tattoo Zoo into blind-box collecting, with different characters and rarities to discover.

That means opening one isn't just about getting a plush. It's about finding out who you got.

And occasionally losing your mind trying to find the rare one.

Why Does Everyone Have Tattoos?

Because tattoos aren't decoration in the Tattoo Zoo universe.

They're part of the character.

We think about the artwork that belongs on each animal, how it works with their personality and how those tattoos help make the character recognizable.

That's an important distinction.

Tattoo Zoo isn't about taking an ordinary plush animal and printing random tattoo flash all over it.

The character and tattoos are designed together.

It's why a Tattoo Zoo character should still feel like that character whether you see them as a large plush, a tiny collectible, a pin, a drawing or somewhere else entirely.

The ink is part of their identity.

Made for People Who Never Really Grew Out of This Stuff

We have absolutely nothing against kids.

But Tattoo Zoo was never designed as a children's brand that adults happen to buy.

We built it for us.

For tattoo people. Collectors. Artists.

People with shelves full of things that serve no practical purpose but make them happy.

People who are technically adults but still get irrationally excited about opening a blind box.

People whose decorating style could reasonably be described as “Where did you even get that?”

That's our crowd.

Tattoo Zoo lives somewhere between tattoo culture, collectible culture and character design—with enough weirdness thrown in to make things interesting.

More Than Plush

Plush is where the Zoo started, but it isn't where it ends.

Tattoo Zoo has grown into a broader world of collectibles, including blind boxes, pins, stickers, backpacks, apparel and other products featuring characters from the Zoo.

 

We've also started bringing Tattoo Zoo into new worlds through artist collaborations, tattoo-industry partnerships and collaborations with other entertainment properties.

The goal isn't to put the Tattoo Zoo logo on everything imaginable.

It's to keep building the world.

Sometimes that means introducing a new animal.

Sometimes it means creating a completely new collection.

Sometimes it means letting another universe wander into the Zoo and seeing what happens.

There's a Story Behind the Stuff

One of the reasons we created Happenings is because there's a lot more happening behind Tattoo Zoo than what ends up on a product page or Instagram post.

Characters go through sketches, prototypes, tattoo designs, samples, changes and occasionally ideas that seemed much better before we actually saw them.

Blind-box collections have their own stories.

Products have stories.

The tattoos have stories.

And after building this universe since 2021, we realized we needed somewhere to tell them.

That's what Happenings is for.

We'll take you behind the scenes of new characters and collections, show how our products are created, talk tattoos and tattoo culture, explore the increasingly dangerous hobby of collecting things, introduce collaborations and occasionally explain why we thought making something like a tattooed duck was a perfectly reasonable business decision.

Welcome to the Zoo

Tattoo Zoo started with a simple idea:

What if stuffed animals had tattoos?

Turns out the answer involved a lot more animals than we anticipated.

And we're nowhere near finished.

So whether you found us because you love tattoos, collect plush, hoard blind boxes, stumbled across one of our weird animals online or simply have excellent taste in unnecessary objects:

Welcome to Tattoo Zoo.

It's a little weird in here. That's the point.